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Friday, 1 July 2016

My
response to this article from the Washington Post is “first they ignore you, then they
attack you...”. My feeling is that Paul and Scribbler must have hit
a raw nerve to have attracted the attenton and to warrant such a
vicious attack.

“Unsupported
and unscientific” ?!!

Have
these people never heard of a hypothesis before?!

Paul Beckwith, at
least, was reporting observations and posing a question.

I
am not sufficiently scientifically literate to be able to judge who
is right and can't tell you about "gigantic gravity waves" but I can make a distinction between a scientific argument
with supporting evidence and an ad hominem attack.

None
of this is helped by Robertscribbler’s comment:

“My
sense of the WAPO article is that it was a bit of a stawman —
conflating me with Beckwith. For one, I did not say ‘planetary
emergency.’”

Well,
he should!

Its
a pity we are dealing with a rather nasty, egotistical individual who
attacks others. In my view Paul, Guy and Robertscribbler have more in
common than what divides them and they should be working together and
just acknowledge their differing points-of-view.

In
the meantime Scribbler has said, “I think this particular issue
calls for further refinement”

Two
bloggers have made a stunning claim that has spread like wildfire on
the Internet: They say the Northern Hemisphere jet stream, the
high-altitude river of winds that separates cold air from warm air,
has done something new and outrageous. They say it has crossed the
equator, joining the jet stream in the Southern Hemisphere. One said
this signifies that the jet stream is ‘wrecked‘, the other said
it means we have a “global climate emergency.”

But
these shrill claims have no validity — air flow between the
hemispheres occurs routinely. The claims are unsupported and
unscientific, and they demonstrate the danger of wild assertions made
by non-experts reaching and misleading the masses.

The
two bloggers who have perpetuated this misinformation are Robert
Scribbler, who describes himself as ” a progressive novelist,
non-fiction writer and emerging threats expert,” and Paul Beckwith,
who is working on a PhD with “a focus on abrupt climate system
change” at the University of Ottawa.

Scribbler
says the cross-equator flow is a manifestation of man-made global
warming, supported by the hypothesis that disproportionate heating of
the Arctic is destabilizing the jet stream. “The Hemispherical Jet
Streams have moved out of the Middle Latitudes more and more,” he
writes. “More and more it has invaded regions both within the Polar
zone and within the Tropics. Now, it appears that the old dividing
lines are so weak that flows of upper level air between Hemispheres
can be exchanged.”

He
concludes that this “violation of dividing lines” is “a kind of
weather weirding that we are not at all really prepared to deal
with.”

Beckwith
writes that the jet stream behavior is “unprecedented” and
represents “climate system mayhem”: “Our climate system
behavior continues to behave in new and scary ways that we have never
anticipated, or seen before. . . . We must declare a global climate
emergency.”

I
reached out to several atmospheric scientists, who have graduate
degrees and are trusted sources in the profession, for their reaction
to these claims. Without exception, they said air flow between the
hemispheres is not at all uncommon.

“This
is total nonsense,” said Cliff Mass, a professor of meteorology at
the University of Washington. “Flow often crosses the equator.”

Mass
added that the cross-equator flow identified by Scribbler and
Beckwith is not between mid-latitude jet streams, as claimed. “The
analysis is making mistakes that even one of my junior undergrads
would not make,” Mass said.

Ryan
Maue, a senior meteorologist with a doctoral degree who works at
WeatherBell Analytics, agreed with Mass that the cross-equator flow
is totally normal and not evidence of a joint hemispheric jet stream.
“Cross-equatorial flow at both upper and lower levels is part of
the seasonal transition of the Western Pacific monsoon through boreal
summer,” he said.

“Sometimes
the flows connect up with each other and make it look like a larger
flow structure is causing the jet stream to flow from one hemisphere
to the other, but it’s in no way unprecedented,” Roy Spencer, a
professor of atmospheric science at University of Alabama-Huntsville,
explained on his blog.

To
be clear, the hypothesis that global warming is destabilizing the
polar jet stream is a legitimate idea that has been published in
peer-reviewed journals, though it remains controversial. But even the
scientist who developed the hypothesis, Jennifer Francis, a professor
of meteorology at Rutgers University, suggested it had been
misapplied by Scribbler and Beckwith. “I’d say cross-equator flow
cannot be unprecedented, maybe not even all that unusual,” she
said.

Sam
Lillo, who is working on his PhD in meteorology at the University of
Oklahoma, said the cross-equator flow evolved from twin areas of high
pressure on either side of the equator while a parade of atmospheric
waves in the Southern Hemisphere had pushed the subtropical (which is
distinct from the mid-latitude or polar jet stream that Scribbler and
Beckwith are discussing) jet stream northward, allowing the link to
occur. “None of this is unusual,” he said. “There isn’t a
wall at the equator separating the two hemispheres, and air is free
to flow from one side to the other.”

Scribbler
had cited a tweet from Lillo to support his argument of a
strengthened equator-to-pole connection, but Lillo countered that the
tweet referred to some unusual behavior of a phenomenon known as the
QBO or Quasi-Biennial Oscillation, which is “a separate story”
from the cross-equator flow. The QBO, he said, is an oscillation in
equatorial stratospheric winds, which has been “out of phase.” He
chalked up the weird QBO behavior to natural variability “even
though I’m an advocate for identifying connections to human-caused
climate change.”

Unfortunately,
the thoroughly specious claims of Scribbler and Beckwith have gone
viral, getting picked up Raw Story, Reddit and Inhabitat.

Such
information viewed through the lens of a non-specialist may come
across as both credible and alarming but damages the reputation of
the science when ultimately shown to be flawed.

“This
fear-mongering helps no one,” Maue said.

Examples
like this demonstrate the pitfalls of extraordinary claims posted on
blogs and the importance of consuming science that has been vetted
and peer-reviewed.